Cycle Your Training

Whether you are a beginner runner or have been running a long time, most runners aim to improve. Whether that is to reduce their time over a specific distance, increase the distance that they can continually run or just to improve their running technique and maintain form over a greater distance. Improvement is what drives us on though, many runners are happy to maintain their fitness and ability at a comfortable level and just run and that is perfectly acceptable and laudable.

The best way to achieve improvement is to follow a mesocycle plan which is a block of training made up of several microcycles with the overall emphasis placed on one or two types of training. The emphasis might be on building endurance, strength, speed, VO2 max or a combination of any of these.

This article is aimed at runners running longer distance and is therefore focused on endurance training but the same science applies to shorter distances, ultra-running, field events and indeed, cycling, swimming and just about any physical sport.

Endurance Training

In the simplest terms endurance training is about stimulus and adaptation. Disrupting the body’s state of equilibrium via stimulus or stress challenges the body’s capabilities and what follows is adaptation, your body’s physiological response to training where the body adapts to cope with the load. You can drive the disruption by repeating or prolonging high-intensity intervals or by sustaining milder efforts for an exceptionally long duration or some form of work between these two. As the body adapts to new levels of stress, it eventually re-establishes equilibrium at a higher level of physical capability.

Now that you have great physical capabilities, a more significant stimulus is required to disrupt the new level of equilibrium. That means that the same workouts the worked before will not provide enough stress on the body to bring about further adaptations. In other words the body must be continually and increasingly challenged if it is to become more capable. This process is called progressive overload.

With that said you cannot continually overload your body. Recovery is necessary in order to maximise the adaptation and this is done through rest when the body physically recovers and also anticipates what is to come and prepares itself for the next challenge. Rest and recovery are the third necessary ingredients in endurance training.

Mesocyle and microcycle

A mesocycle can last anywhere between a few weeks to several months but for endurance training they typically last 8-10 weeks with the focus on achieving peak fitness in time for a targeted event. A mesocycle is often referred to as block. In a typical 8-week block the first 3 weeks progressively overload your body while the fourth week focuses on recovery, the next 3 weeks will see another progressive overload until the last week which eases off the load in what is called a taper.

A microcycle is the shortest training cycle in a mesocycle and generally lasts one week. Microcycles are designed to vary the levels of stress an athlete is subjected to throughout the week’s training sessions. Each microcycle within a mesocycle usually sees a slight increase in the overall amount of stress from the previous microcycle, while each workout will see a similar increase in the amount of work demanded. The exception is when the microcycle is focused on recovery or taper and therefore the load is less than the previous microcycle.

Although workouts will vary from day to day the microcycle includes the rhythm and cadence of a training plan where for example Tuesday and Thursday are tempo runs, Wednesday might be speed endurance, Sunday is the long slow run with Monday and Friday reserved for rest and this is the pattern for the complete mesocycle. Athletes can always customise the days they train to fit around their work schedule or add cross-training or swim sessions or yoga as additional sessions depending on time factors, base fitness and lifestyle.

Peak Fitness

Peak fitness is preceded by the aforementioned taper in which you reduce the amount of training stimulus to encourage freshness. The goal of a taper is to minimise the adverse physiological and psychological stresses of daily training to optimise performance. Peak fitness is the culmination of an increasingly progressive and specific stimulus, more stress is unlikely to result in further positive adaptation and the training effect will level off and plateau. While it is impossible to maintain a fitness peak indefinitely it can be held for several weeks.

So Why Train in Cycles?

Fundamental to endurance training is the repetition of stimulus, recovery and adaptation done in a mesocycle. Structured training plans aim to add just enough stress so as not to be totally overwhelming while providing adequate rest that drives the physiological changes. Additionally a training plan should progressively focus on particular types of fitness adaptations, built upon more general forms of fitness. The course of a training plan will eventually bring your fitness to a well-timed peak level.